“Put me in Hercules,” were her last faint words. “I want to be inside him.”
Franz did as she asked. First he gently washed the child, wrapped it in clean linen, and put it in a basket next to Anna’s bed. Then he turned to Anna where she lay on the bed. He wiped the blood off her body with a wet cloth and folded a clean sheet around her. He lifted her off the bed with some difficulty and carried her over to where Hercules waited. She fit in the oven perfectly.
“That’s the last you’ll get,” he told Hercules. “I’m not going to feed you.”
The steam engine seemed to glare at Franz from its corner. The oven hatch glowed with the heat from Anna’s body. Franz turned his back on it and picked the baby up, cradling it in his arms. It opened its mouth and cried with a whistling noise. Franz walked over to his side of the warehouse, holding the baby up in front of his airship.
“We’re foster parents now, Beatrice,” he said.
For the first time he could sense a reaction from her. It felt like approval, but it wasn’t directed at him.
The child was a girl. Franz named her Josephine. He tried to feed her cow’s milk at first, but she spit it out, hissing. She steadily lost weight, her pistons squealing and rasping, until Franz in desperation dissolved some coal in water, dipped the end of a rag in it and stuck it in her mouth. When Josephine immediately sucked the rag dry, Franz understood what kind of care his foster daughter needed. He took the box of maintenance tools Anna had kept for Hercules, and greased Josephine’s pistons carefully with good oil. He fed her a steady diet of coal-water, gradually increasing the coal until it was a thick paste. When she had enough teeth, he gave her small bits of coal to gnaw on. The girl didn’t need diapers, as she didn’t produce any waste; she seemed to spend whatever she ate as body heat. If he fed her too much, she became unbearably hot to the touch, her pistons burning his hands. These peculiarities aside, she behaved much like a normal baby.
Franz wrote a letter of resignation to the clinic. He sold Hercules to a factory, and Anna’s furniture to an auction house. The money would be enough for rent and food for a long time to come, if he spent it wisely. He would at least be able to take care of his airship and his foster daughter. Whenever he had to leave their home, he put the baby in Beatrice’s gondola. When he came back, the baby was always in a good humour, comfortably cradled in the otherwise hard seat, cooing and playing with dials or tubes that had somehow come loose from the console. When Josephine was old enough not to need constant feeding, he found work at another clinic. Josephine seemed content to spend her days in the gondola. Beatrice radiated affection whenever the girl was near.
The catastrophe came when Josephine was four years old. The little girl didn’t have vocal cords, but instead a set of minuscule pipes arrayed in her larynx. She whistled and tweeted until her fourth birthday, when she suddenly started modulating the noise into speech. It was early morning. They had just finished breakfast. Josephine was sitting on the table, Franz lubricating the pistons in her arms. Josephine opened her mouth and said in a high, fluting voice:
“Father, her name isn’t Beatrice.”
“Is that so,” said Franz, dripping oil on her finger joints.
“She says so every time you call her Beatrice. That’s not my name, she says.”
Franz blinked. “Do you understand everything she says?”
“Her name isn’t Beatrice,” Josephine repeated. “It’s something else. And she wants to say some things to you.”
Josephine sat with her legs dangling from the gondola, warbling the airship’s thoughts without seeming to grasp their meaning. Franz was informed of the following: The airship’s name wasn’t Beatrice. It was something entirely different. She had lived as a slave under Franz, and he had raped her while pretending she was someone else. She hated him.
“That can’t be right,” said Franz. “We worked on this marriage together. She was the one who wouldn’t make an effort.”
“She says, I had no choice,” said Josephine. “She says, you’re holding me captive.”
Franz felt his throat constrict. “I certainly am not,” he said. “I’ve worked so hard.” He shoved his hands in his pockets to stop them from trembling. “I’ve worked so hard,” he repeated.
“She wants to fly,” said Josephine.
Franz opened the great double doors to the warehouse, and slowly towed Beatrice outside. He knew what was going to happen. That Josephine was going to climb into the gondola while he was busy sorting out the tethers. That Beatrice II would tear free of her moorings and swiftly rise up into the sky, drifting east. That she would be gone in a matter of minutes, leaving him alone on the ground.
He sorted out the tethers. Meanwhile, Josephine climbed into the gondola. Beatrice II suddenly pulled at the moorings, which snapped, and she ascended without a sound. Franz stood outside the warehouse, watching the sky, until night fell.
Some Letters for Ove Lindström
Hi, Dad.
It’s Saturday and it’s been thirty-six days since they found you. You lay in the apartment for three days before the neighbors called the police because the cat was howling. That was on a Friday. They said at the hospital it looked like a massive heart attack, probably quick. They asked if you and I were close. I said no: I couldn’t cope with your drinking, broke off contact with you many years ago.
That same night I dreamed about Mum for the first time in many years. She was standing at the edge of the forest, her back turned. Her dark hair tumbled in tangles down her back. The hem of her red dress dragged at the ground. I was sitting in the sandbox. I couldn’t move. She walked in among the trees and there was a tinkling sound on the air, like tiny bells.
I entered your apartment prepared for something like the last time I was there: floors covered by a thick layer of newspapers and milk cartons, piles of clothes, and dirty dishes on the furniture, and a layer of greasy filth over everything. Fruit flies in the kitchen. Maggots in the sink. The stench of rot and unwashed human.
But I opened the door to empty rooms and a smell of pine soap. Floors and surfaces were scrubbed clean, the kitchen immaculate. I couldn’t see any bottles or beer cans. Did you quit drinking? When? There was no smell of smoke either. I wonder when you quit the cigarettes and when you decided to clean out the flat. There were a couple of suitcases standing near the door.
I took care of the cat. I don’t know what you named her, but I call her Squeak—she’s thin as a pipe cleaner and meows like a squeaky toy. She’s hungry and pissed off, but fine.
I called Björn and Maggie. Björn said he’d talked to you on Monday. You’d said you were getting your act together: going out to the old schoolhouse at Munsö to start over. It was going to be just like old times.
“Maybe he had a feeling something was about to happen,” Björn said. “But on the other hand… I don’t know. He would do that about once a year. He’d clean the flat and go to Munsö to start over, and then he’d come back a couple of weeks later and it’d be just like before.”
“He never told me that,” I said.
“Maybe he was afraid to. I know I was. I didn’t tell you because I knew he’d just fall off the wagon again. Just as well you didn’t hear about it.”
I’m glad Björn didn’t tell me.
These people came to the service: Björn and Maggie, Per-Arne, Eva and Ingeborg, Peter and Lena, Dolores, Magnus, Alice. I hadn’t seen any of them except Björn and Maggie since I was maybe eighteen. They have changed. They’re not just older. They came in expensive cars, with rounded bellies under designer shirts and dresses. They’re not starving activists anymore. Björn and Maggie showed up in denim. That made me feel less abnormal. Maggie held my hand all through the service.